Magnum iocum dare: Literature as Play in the Eleventh Century

Abstract

This paper examines the self-consciously ludic quality of three ambitious eleventh-century Latin verse narratives: the Ecbasis captivi, Reginald of Canterbury’s Malchus, and the Ruodlieb. All three emphasize games, play and playfulness in their plots as well as their stated or implied poetics. The literary modes of digression and amplification, common to all, blend with the thematics of escape and return, freedom and constraint; the Ecbasis captivi cleverly unites all these meanings in its title, and can serve as a model for reading the other poems. I argue that the playfulness is not incidental, but necessary and programmatic. Before the twelfth-century emergence of narrative genres, new (vernacular) literary languages, and a courtly audience, which gives writers an established context for their work, imaginative poets have to create their poetics as they go along, and each work is in a sense a unique experiment. All three texts express the freedom, joy, and audacity of such experimentation.